Paul Ibaraki

Paul Ibaraki (also known as Paulo Ibaraki) was a Japanese Catholic layman of the late sixteenth century and one of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan, executed by crucifixion at Nagasaki in 1597. Reliable sources do not record a verified year or city of birth. He belonged to a Christian family that furnished three of the twenty-six: Ibaraki himself, his brother Leo Karasumaru, and their nephew Louis Ibaraki, a boy of about twelve who served around the Franciscan community. His life falls in the generation after Francis Xavier’s mission of the 1540s–1550s, when Catholic communities had taken root in Kyushu and in the capital region of Miyako (Kyoto) under Jesuit and, later, Franciscan pastoral care, even as political suspicion of the foreign religion grew under Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Ibaraki entered the Third Order of Saint Francis and attached himself to the Franciscan friars working in and around Kyoto. Period accounts present him as a lay catechist of some education who assisted the missionaries and was known for works of mercy, especially toward the poor and toward people afflicted with leprosy. That pattern of tertiary life—penitential association with the friars, catechesis, and charity—was shared by several of the Japanese companions arrested with the Franciscans. His brother Leo was likewise a tertiary; the child Louis is remembered as an acolyte or helper. No securely documented evidence survives concerning whether Paul Ibaraki himself married or had children; Louis was a nephew, not a son.

The arrests followed Hideyoshi’s turn from earlier, uneven toleration to open persecution after the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe in 1596 and reports that missionaries were a vanguard of conquest. In late December 1596 Franciscans, a few Jesuits, and Japanese tertiaries and helpers in the Kyoto–Osaka region were seized. The prisoners, Ibaraki among them, had a portion of the left ear cut off as a public mark of infamy and were then driven on a winter march of several weeks from the capital district to Nagasaki, exhibited in towns along the route. Contemporary narratives of that journey describe the group singing psalms and mutually encouraging one another; the presence of the three boys among the condemned, including Louis Ibaraki, is a consistent feature of the tradition.

On 5 February 1597 the twenty-six were crucified on Nishizaka Hill above Nagasaki harbor, bound or nailed to crosses and killed with lances according to Japanese practice. Paul Ibaraki died there together with Leo Karasumaru, Louis Ibaraki, the Jesuit Paul Miki and his two Jesuit companions, the Franciscan Pedro Bautista and his friar companions, and the remaining Japanese lay Christians. The bodies were left on the crosses for a time and then buried at the site; relics were later recovered and dispersed. Cult of the martyrs spread among Japanese Christians and in the wider Church. Pope Urban VIII beatified the twenty-six in 1627; Pope Pius IX canonized them on 8 June 1862. Their collective liturgical feast is kept on 6 February, and they are honored as patrons of Japan. The Nishizaka ground is today a memorial of the martyrdom.